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Traffic management: Europeans will back cross-border ITS says transport chief
Future European Commission support for key traffic management initiatives is now virtually certain, a Brussels official said last week.
Paul Verhoef, head of intelligent transport systems at the commission’s directorate-general for transport and energy, was speaking in Barcelona, at the fourth annual conference of the Euro-regional projects set up to speed cross-border ITS deployment on the trans-European road network.
Verhoef dispelled fears of a switch of emphasis for the Euro-regional projects when funding for programmes such as STREETWISE (Seamless Travel Environment for Efficient Transport) ends in December. He placed ITS ‘among the most promising priority areas for decongesting the EU’s main road corridors’. This would mean continued EC backing for initiatives of the kind highlighted at Barcelona last week, notably the development of seamless data exchange between regional traffic control centres.
Others include: improved traffic and routeing information for HGV drivers using long-distance corridors; integration of urban and inter-urban traffic management in Northern Ireland; and the initiation of a Scottish national journey time service.
Also at the conference, the Highways Agency reported widespread driver acceptance of mandatory variable-speed limits in its active traffic management scheme on the M42 near Birmingham. This is paving the way for the planned introduction, by March 2007, of hard-shoulder running at a maximum of 50mph, delegates heard.
